For us two this contest contained a very interesting revelation. It proved to us that my letters were not only read by the prison authorities, but that their contents were made known to the Russian embassy as well. When I was at Lyons, and my wife had gone to see Elisée Reclus in Switzerland, she wrote to me once that “ our boy ” was get- ting on very well; his health was excellent, and they all spent a very nice evening at the anniversary of his fifth birthday. I knew that she meant “Le Révolté,” which we often used to name in conversations “ our gamin,’’ — our naughty boy. But now that these gentlemen were inquir- ing about ‘our gamin,” and even designated so correctly his age, it was evident that the letter had passed through other hands than those of the governor. It was well to know this.
Nothing escapes the attention of village-folk in the coun- try, and the baron soon awakened suspicions. He wrote a new letter to my wife, even more wordy than the former 482 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST ones. Now he asked her pardon for having tried to intro- fluce himself as an acquaintance. He owned that she did not know him; but nevertheless he was a well-wisher. He had a most important communication to make to her. My life was in danger, and he wanted to warn her. ‘The baron and his secretary took an outing in the fields to read this letter together and to consult about its tenor, — the forest-guard following them at a distance; but they quarreled about it, and the letter was torn to pieces and thrown on the ground. ‘The forester waited till they were out of sight, gathered the pieces, connected them, and read the letter. In an hour’s time the village knew that the baron had never really been acquainted with my wife; the romance which was so sentimentally repeated by the baron’s party crumbled to pieces.
“Ah, then they are not what they pretended to be,’ the brigadier de gendarmerie concluded in his turn; “ then they must be German spies;”’ and he arrested them.
It must be said in his behalf that a German spy had really been at Clairvaux shortly before. In time of war the vast buildings of the prison might serve as depots for provisions or barracks for the army, and the German -gen- eral staff was surely interested to know the inner capacity of the prison buildings. Accordingly a jovial traveling photographer came to our village, made friends with every — one by photographing all of them for nothing, and was ad- mitted to photograph not only the inside of the prison yards, but also the dormitories. Having done this, he trayeled to some other town on the eastern frontier, and was there arrested by the French authorities, as a man found - in possession of compromising military documents. The brigadier, fresh from the impression of that visit, jumped to the conclusion that the baron and his secretary were also German spies, and took them in custody to the little town, of Bar-sur-Aube. There they were released next morning, — EVIL OF THE GOVERNMENT SPY SYSTEM 483 the local paper stating that they were not German spies, but ‘persons commissioned by another more friendly power.”
Now public opinion turned entirely against the baron and his secretary, who had to live through more adventures. After their release they entered a small village café, and there ventilated their griefs in German in a friendly con- versation over a bottle of wine. ‘‘ You were stupid, you were a coward,” the self-styled interpreter said to the self- styled baron. ‘‘If J had been in your place, I would have shot that examining magistrate with this revolver. Let him only repeat that with me, — he will have these bullets in his head!” And so on.
A commercial traveler who sat quietly in a corner of the room rushed at once to the brigadier to report the conver- sation which he had overheard. The brigadier made an official report immediately, and again arrested the secretary, —a pharmacist from Strasburg. He was taken before a police court at the same town of Bar-sur-Aube, and got a full month’s imprisonment ‘for menaces uttered against a magistrate in a public place.” After that the baron had more adventures, and the village did not resume its usual quietness till after the departure of the two strangers.
I have here related only a very few of the spy stories that I might tell. But when one thinks of the thousands of villains going about the world in the pay of all govern- ments, —and very often well paid for their villainies, — of the traps they lay for all sorts of artless people, of the vast sums of money thrown away in the maintenance of that army, which is recruited in the lowest strata of society and from the population of the prisons, of the corruption of all sorts-which they pour into society at large, nay, even into families, one cannot but be appalled at the immensity of - the evil which is thus done.
XV XV DremaANps for our release were continually raised, both in the press and in the Chamber of Deputies, — the more so as about the same time that we were condemned Louise Michel was condemned, too, for robbery! Louise Michel — who always gives literally her last shawl or cloak to the woman who is in need of it, and who never could be com- pelled, during her imprisonment, to have better food than her fellow prisoners, because she always gave them what was sent to her— was condemned, together with another comrade, Pouget, to nine years’ imprisonment for highway robbery! That sounded too bad even for the middle-class opportunists. She marched one day at the head of a pro- cession of the unemployed, and, entering a baker’s shop, took a few loaves from it and distributed them to the hungry column: this was her robbery. The release of the anarchists thus became a war-cry against the government, and in the autumn of 1885 all my comrades save three were set at liberty by a decree of President Grévy. Then the outcry in behalf of Louise Michel and myself became still louder. However, Alexander III. objected to it; and one day the prime minister, M. Freycinet, answering an inter-— pellation in the Chamber, said that ‘‘diplomatic difficulties — stood in the way of Kropotkin’s release.” Strange words in the mouth of the prime minister of an independent country; but still stranger words have been heard since in connection with that ill-omened alliance of France with imperial Russia.
In the middle of January, 1886, both Louise Michel and Pouget, as well as the four of us who were still at Clair vaux, were set free. 2 ELIE AND ELISEE RECLUS 485 My release meant also the release of my wife from her voluntary imprisonment in the little village at the prison gates, which began to tell upon.her health, and we went to Paris to stay there for a few weeks with our friend, Elie Reclus, — a writer of great power in anthropology, who is often mistaken outside France for his younger brother, the geographer, Elisée. A close friendship has united the two brothers from early youth. When the time came for them to enter a university, they went together from a small country place in the valley of the Gironde to Strasburg, making the journey on foot, — accompanied, like true wander- ing students, by their dog; and when they stayed at some village, it was the dog which got the bowl of soup, while the two brothers’ supper very often consisted only of bread with a few apples. From Strasburg the younger brother went to Berlin, whither he was attracted by the lectures of the great Ritter. Later on, in the forties, they were both at Paris. Elie Reclus became a convinced Fourierist, and both saw in the republic of 1848 the coming of a new era of social evolution. Consequently, after Napoleon ITI.’s coup d’état, they both had to leave France, and emigrated to England. When the amnesty was voted, and they re- turned to Paris, Elie edited there a Fourierist codperative paper, which circulated widely among the workers. It is not generally known, but may be interesting to note, that Napoleon III., who played the part of a Cesar, — interested, as behooves a Cesar, in the conditions of the working classes, —used to send one of his aides-de-camp to the printing- office of the paper, each time it was printed, to take to the Tuileries the first sheet issued from the press. He was, later on, even ready to patronize the International Working- men’s Association, on the condition that it should put in one of its reports a few words of confidence in the great socialist plans of the Cesar; and he ordered its prosecution when the Internationalists refused point blank to do any, thing of the sort.
486 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST When the Commune was proclaimed, both brothers heart- ily joined it, and Elie accepted the post of keeper of the National Library and the Louvre Museum under Vaillant. It was, to a great extent, to his foresight and to his hard work that we owe the preservation of the invaluable trea- sures of human knowledge and art accumulated in these two institutions, during the bombardment of Paris by the armies of Thiers and the subsequent conflagration. A pas- sionate lover of Greek art, and profoundly acquainted with it, he had had all the most precious statues and vases of the Louvre packed and placed in the vaults, while the great- est precautions were taken to store in a safe place the most precious books of the National Library, and to protect the building from the conflagration which raged round it, His wife, a courageous woman, a worthy companion of the — philosopher, followed in the streets by her two little boys, organized in the meantime in her own quarter of the town a system of feeding the people, who had been reduced to sheer destitution during the second siege. In the last few weeks of its existence the Commune finally realized that a supply of food for the people, who were deprived of the means of earning it for themselves, ought to have been the Commune’s first care, and volunteers organized the relief. It was by mere accident that Elie Reclus, who had kept to his post till the last moment, escaped being shot by the Versailles troops; and a sentence of deportation having © been pronounced upon him, — for having dared to accept so necessary a service under the Commune, — he went with his family into exile. Now, on his return to Paris, he had resumed the work of his life, ethnology. What this work is may be judged from a few, a very few chapters of it, published in book form under the titles of ‘ Primitive Folk” and “The Australians,’”’ as well as from the history of the origin of religions, which forms the substance of his lectures at the Kcole des Hautes Etudes, at Brussels, —a LOUISE MICHEL 487 foundation of his brother. In the whole range of ethnologi- cal literature there are not many works imbued to the same extent with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the true nature of primitive man. As to his history of re- ligions (part of which was published in the review “ Société Nouvelle,” and which is now being continued in its succes- sor, ‘‘ Humanité Nouvelle ”?) it is, I venture to say, the best work on the subject that has yet appeared; undoubtedly superior to Herbert Spencer’s attempt in the same direction, because Herbert Spencer, with all his immense inteliect, does not possess that understanding of the artless and sim- ple nature of the primitive man which Elie Reclus pos- sesses to a rare perfection, and to which he has added an extremely wide knowledge of a rather neglected branch of folk-psychology, — the evolution and transformation of be- liefs. It is needless to speak of Elie Reclus’ infinite good nature and modesty, or of his superior intelligence and vast knowledge of all subjects relating to humanity; it is all comprehended in his style, which is his and no one else’s. With his modesty, his calm manner, and his deep philo- sophical insight, he is the type of the Greek philosopher of antiquity. In a society less fond of patented tuition and of piecemeal instruction, and more appreciative of the development of wide humanitarian conceptions, he would be surrounded by flocks of pupils, like one of his Greek prototypes.
A very animated socialist and anarchist movement was going on at Paris while we stayed there. Louise Michel lectured every night, and aroused the enthusiasm of her audiences, whether they consisted of workingmen or were made up of middle-class people. Her already great popu- larity became still greater, and spread even amongst the university students, who might hate advanced ideas, but worshiped in her the ideal woman. While I was at Paris a riot, caused by some one speaking disrespectfully of Louise 488 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST Michel in the presence of students, took place in a café, The young men took up her defense and made a great uproar, smashing all the tables and glasses in the café. I also lectured once, on anarchism, before an audience of sey- eral thousand people, and left Paris immediately after that lecture, before the government could obey the injunctions of the reactionary and pro-Russian press, which insisted upon my being expelled from France.
From Paris we went to London, where I found once more my two old friends, Stepnidk and Tchaykévsky. Life in London was no more the dull, vegetating existence that it had been for me four years before. We settled in a small cottage at Harrow. We cared little about the furniture of the cottage, a good part of which I made myself with the aid of Tchaykévsky, — he had been in the United States and had learned some carpentering,—but we rejoiced immensely at having a small plot of heavy Middlesex clay in our garden. My wife and I went with much enthusiasm into gardening, the admirable results of which I had before realized after having made acquaintance with the writings of Toubeau, and some Paris market-gardeners, and after our own experiment in the prison garden at Clairvaux. As for my wife, who had typhoid fever soon after we settled at Harrow, the work in the garden during the period of con- valescence was more completely restorative than a stay at the very best sanatorium would have been.
Near the end of the summer a heavy blow fell upon me. — I learned that my brother Alexander was no longer living, During the years that I had been abroad before my im- prisonment in France we had never corresponded with each other. In the eyes of the Russian government, to love a brother who is persecuted for his political opinions is itself asin. To maintain relations with him after he has become a refugee isa crime. A subject of the Tsar must hate all EXILE OF MY BROTHER ALEXANDER 489 the rebels against the supreme ruler’s authority, — and Alexander was in the clutches of the Russian police. I persistently refused, therefore, to write to him or to any other of my relatives. After the Tsar had written on the petition of our sister Hélene, “Let him remain there,” there was no hope of a speedy release for my brother. ‘T'wo years after that a committee was nominated to settle terms for those who had been exiled to Siberia without judgment, for an undetermined time, and my brother got five years. That made seven, with the two which he had already been kept there. Then a new committee was nominated under Loris Mélikoff, and added another five years. My brother was thus to be liberated in October, 1886. That made twelve years of exile, first in a tiny town of East Siberia, and afterwards at Tomsk, —that is, in the lowlands of West Siberia, where he had not even the dry and healthy climate of the high prairies further east.
When I was imprisoned at Clairvaux he wrote to me, and we exchanged a few letters. He wrote that though our letters would be read by the Russian police in Siberia, and by the French prison authorities in France, we might as well write to each other even under this double super- vision. He spoke of his family life, of his three children, whom he described interestingly, and of his work. He earnestly advised me to keep a watchful eye upon the de- velopment of science in Italy, where excellent and original researches are conducted, but remain unknown in the scien- tific world until they have been exploited in Germany; and he gave me his opinions about the probable progress of po- — litical life in Russia. He did not believe in the possibility with us, in a near future, of constitutional rule on the pat- tern of the West European parliaments; but he looked for- ward — and found it quite sufficient for the moment — to _ the convocation of a sort of deliberative National Assembly (Zémskiy Sobér or Etats Généraux). It would not make 490 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST laws, but would only work out the schemes of laws, ta which the imperial power and the Council of State would give definitive form and final sanction.
Above all he wrote to me about his scientific work, He had always had a decided leaning towards astronomy, and when we were at St. Petersburg he had published in Russian an excellent summary of all our knowledge of the shooting stars. With his fine critical mind he soon saw the strong or the weak points of different hypotheses; and without sufficient knowledge of mathematics, but endowed with a powerful imagination, he succeeded in grasping the results of the most intricate mathematical researches. Living with his imagination amongst the moving celestial bodies, he realized their complex movements often better than some mathematicians, — especially the pure algebra- ists, — who are apt to lose sight of the realities of the phy- sical world and see nothing but their own formule. Our St. Petersburg astronomers spoke to me with great appreciation of that work of my brother’s. Now, he undertook to study the structure of the universe; to analyze the data and the hypotheses about the worlds of suns, star-clusters, and nebule in the infinite space, and to work out the problems of their grouping, their life, and the laws of their evolu- tion and decay. The Ptlkova astronomer, Gyldén, spoke highly of this new work of Alexander’s, and introduced him by correspondence to Mr. Holden in the United States, from whom, while at Washington lately, I had the ‘pleasure of hearing an appreciative estimate of the value of these researches. Science is greatly in need, from time to time, of such scientific speculations of a higher standard, made by a scrupulously laborious, critical, and, at the same time, imaginative mind.
But in a small town of Siberia, far away from all the libraries, unable to follow the progress of science, he had only succeeded in embodying in his work the researches MY BROTHER'S SCIENTIFIC WORK 491 which had been made up to the date of his exile. Some capital work had been done since. He knew it, but how could he get access to the necessary books, so long as he re- mained in Siberia? The approach of the time of his libera- tion did not inspire him with hope either. He knew that he would not be allowed to stay in any of the university towns of Russia, or of Western Europe, but that his exile to Siberia would be followed by a second exile, perhaps even worse than the first, to some hamlet of Eastern Russia.
‘A despair like Faust’s takes hold of me at times,”’ he wrote to me. When the time of his liberation was at hand, he sent his wife and children to Russia, taking advantage of one of the last steamers before the close of navigation, and, on a gloomy night, this despair put an end to his life.
A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months, — until a flash of light pierced it, when, the next spring, a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother’s name, came into the world, and with her helpless cry set new strings vi- brating in my heart.
XVI In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full — swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined it in all — the principal towns, as well as a number of middle-class: people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways. An — acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard groups — of workers going about in the streets singing “ We’ve got no work to do,” or some hymn, and begging for bread. — People flocked at night into Trafalgar Square, to sleep there — in the open air, in the wind and the rain, between two newspapers; and one day in February a crowd, after hay- ing listened to the speeches of Burns, Hyndman, and | Champion, rushed into Piccadilly and broke a few windows — in the great shops. Far more important, however, than this outbreak of discontent was the spirit which prevailed ‘ amongst the poorer portion of the working population in — the outskirts of London. It was such that if the leaders of the movement, who were prosecuted for the riots, had received severe sentences, a spirit of hatred and revenge, hitherto unknown in the recent history of the labor move- ment in England, but the symptoms of which were very well Mea marked in 1886, would have been developed, and would ig time to come. However, the middle classes ve realized the danger. Considerable sums ficient to 8 “eee subscribed in the West End; least, good intentions. As to the SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND 493 sentences which were passed upon the prosecuted leaders, they were limited to two or three months’ imprisonment.
The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform and reconstruction of society was very great among all classes of people. Beginning with the au- tumn and throughout all the winter I was asked to lecture all over the country, partly on prisons but mainly on anar- chist socialism, and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England and Scotland. As a rule I accepted the first invitation I received for entertainment on the night of the lecture, and consequently it happened that I stayed one night in a rich man’s mansion, and the next in the narrow quarters of a working family. Every night I saw consid- erable numbers of people of all classes; and whether it was in the worker’s small parlor, or in the reception-room of the wealthy, the most animated discussions went on about socialism and anarchism till a late hour, — with hope in the workman’s house, with apprehension in the mansion, but everywhere with the same earnestness.
In the mansion the main questions asked were, “‘ What do the socialists want? What do they intend to do?” and next, “What are the concessions which it is absolutely necessary to make at some given mouent in order to avoid serious conflicts?’ In our conversations I seldom heard the justice of the socialist contention simply denied, or de- scribed as sheer nonsense. But I found a firm conviction that a revolution was impossible in England; that the elaims of the mass of the workers had not yet reached the precision nor the extent of the claims of the socialists, and that the workers would be satisfied with much less; so that secondary concessions, amounting to a prospect of a slight increase of well-being or of leisure, would be accepted by the working classes of England as a pledge, in the mean- time, of still more in the future. ‘ We are a left-centre country; we live by compromise,” I was once told by an 494 _ MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST _ aged member of Parliament who had had a wide experience | of the life of his mother country. ‘ In workmen’s dwellings, too, I noticed a difference in the questions which were addressed to me in England from — those which I was asked on the Continent. General prin- ciples, of which the partial applications will be determined by the principles themselves, deeply interest the Latin work- ers. If this or that municipal council votes funds in sup- port of a strike, or provides for the feeding of the children at the schools, no importance is attached to such steps. They are taken as a matter of fact. ‘Of course a hungry child cannot learn,” a French worker says, “it must be fed.” “Of course the employer was wrong in forcing the workers to strike.” That is all that is said, and no praise is given to such minor concessions by the present individual- ist society to communist principles. The thought of the worker goes beyond the period of such concessions, and he " asks whether it is the commune or the unions of workers, — or the state which ought to undertake the organization of production; whether free agreement alone will be sufficient ‘ to maintain society in working order, and what could ~ be the moral restraint if society parted with its present _ repressive agencies; whether an elected democratic govern- ment would be capable of accomplishing serious changes _ in the socialist direction, and whether accomplished facts — ought not to precede legislation; and so on. In England, it was upon a series of palliative concessions, gradually growing in importance, that the chief weight was laid. But on — the other hand the impossibility of state administration of in- dustries seemed to have been settled long before in the work- ers’ minds, while what chiefly interested most of them was matters of constructive realization, as well as how to attain the conditions which would make such a realization possible, — “Well, Kropétkin, suppose that to-morrow we were to take THE MIDDLE CLASSES IN ENGLAND 495 ‘possession of the docks of our town. What’s your idea about how to manage them? ” would be asked, for instance, as soon as we had sat down in a workingman’s parlor. Or, “We don’t like the idea of state management of rail- ways, and the present management by private companies is organized robbery. But suppose the workers own all the railways. How could the working of them be organized?” The lack of general ideas was thus supplemented by a de- sire of going deeper into the details of the realities. Another feature of the movement in England was the considerable number of middle-class people who gave it their support in different ways,—some of them frankly joining it, while others helped it from the outside. In France and in Switzerland the two parties — the workers and the middle classes — stood arrayed against each other, sharply separated from each other. So it was, at least, in the years 1876-85. When I was in Switzerland I could say that during my three or four years’ stay in the country I was acquainted with none but workers. I hardly knew more than a couple of middle-class men. In England this would have been impossible. We found quite a number of middle-class men and women who did not hesitate to appear openly, both in London and in the provinces, as helpers in organizing socialist meetings, or in going about during a strike with boxes to collect coppers in the parks. Besides, we saw a movement similar to what we had had in Le, in the early seventies, when our youth rushed “to the people,” though by no means so intense, so full of self sacrifice, and so utterly devoid of the idea of “ charity.” | Here also, in England, a considerable number of people went in all sorts of capacities to live near the workers, in the slums, in people’s palaces, in Toynbee Hall, and the like. It must be said that there was a great deal of enthusiasm at that time. Many probably thought that a 496 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST social revolution had already commenced. As always hap- pens, however, with such enthusiasts, when they saw that in England, as everywhere, there was a long, tedious, pre- paratory uphill work to be done, very many of them res tired from active work, and now stand outside of it as mere sympathetic onlookers.
XVII I roox a lively part in this movement, and with a few English comrades I started, in addition to the three so- cialist papers already in existence, an anarchist-communist monthly, ‘‘ Freedom,” which continues to live up to the present hour. At the same time I resumed my work on anarchism where I had had to interrupt it at the time of my arrest. The critical part of it was published by Elisée Reclus, during my Clairvaux imprisonment, under the title, “Paroles d’un Révolté.”” Now I began to work out the constructive part of an anarchist-communist society, — so far as it could be forecast, —in a series of articles published at Paris in “La Révolte.’ ‘Our boy,” prosecuted for anti-militarist propaganda, had been compelled to change its title-page, and now appeared under a feminine name. Later on these articles were published in a more elaborate form in a book, “ La Conquéte du Pain.”
These researches caused me to study more thoroughly certain points in the economic life of the civilized nations of | to-day. Most socialists had hitherto said that in our pre- sent civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all; that it was only the distribution which was defective; and, if a social revolution took place, all that was required would be for every one to return to his factory or workshop, — so- ciety taking possession for itself of the ‘surplus value,” or benefits, which now went to the capitalist. I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, and was entirely inadequate even as regards the very necessaries 4 ' 498 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST of life. None of these necessaries are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all; and the over-production, so often spoken of, means no- ,thing but that the masses are too poor to buy even what is in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural — and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely | increased, so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. ‘This